Pascal Leong

Coms 102-06
April 26th 2021
Speech #1
Intro Speech reflection

After watching the recording of my speech, I have noticed quite a few things
that I did well in this speech. I am most proud of my preparation for this speech. It’s
apparent that I reference my outline throughout my speech, but more often than not I
used it to smoothly remind myself of what to say without just manuscripting the entire
thing. I believe I utilized transitions effectively in this sense too, using them as
checkpoints between my more riffed sections. I am also happy that the riffed sections
turned out the way they did, after practicing a few different versions of the speech I
think the true shape and form of the speech came forth. I am quite proud of the light
bits of humor I inserted at various points in the speech (even though it’s a bit
embarrassing trying to watch myself try to be funny). I was mostly clear when
speaking and you can hear the vast majority of words I say. Lastly, I think my topic
was really deep and though I started talking about my family dinners, I ended up
giving insights into multiple aspects of my life like my parent’s divorce, ethnicity,
and home life. Overall, the complexity of my topic and avoidance of manuscript made
this a very personal speech, which is a great success in the context of an introduction
speech.
My speech did, however, also include a lot of shortcomings that could’ve been
tweaked or avoided all together. My eye movement is a bit too much for me to just
ignore, and I am sure my audience shared that opinion. I want to work on sustaining
eye contact throughout the speech and avoid drifting away from the audience. In a
similar way, my body language could have been more consistent. I just look a bit
awkward throughout the speech because I am not sitting up entirely straight and I
would wobble on occasion. There were also some pacing issues at times, I would just
speak a bit fast or the microphone would fail to hear all the syllables. To fix this I’d
like to work on enunciating and trying my best to not tackle words that I am not able
to pronounce or that I wouldn’t use in everyday conversation. My biggest problem
with this speech was organization. While writing and practicing my speech outline, I
found it challenging to set the context of my topic and ended up including it as one of
the main points. I think there could have been a way for me to work this into my other
main points but I don’t think there is a clear solution to this issue. Another issue with
my introductory speech was the lack of specific personal anecdotes. Even though I
had a personal tone and topic, I could have supported my ideas with stories to really
convince my audience that this was a lived in speech. My lack of clarity in the
outlining stages paired with occasional pacing issues made my speech hard to follow,
especially towards the beginning where I used a transition that was a lot like my
thesis which may have sounded repetitive. Moving forward I will look to find true
comfort while giving speeches to fix pacing and body language issues and work on
outlining for better structure.